


Sifting

by Northlight (anenko)



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Early Fandom, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-11-28
Updated: 2002-11-28
Packaged: 2017-10-03 22:48:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anenko/pseuds/Northlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tell me, she says, tell me everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sifting

Tell me, she says.

A muscle jumps in his jaw. He knows what she is doing. He can feel her brushing along his mind. He is a challenge. The X5s are different: a shade off of completely sane, a step away from completely human. They have been trained to obey orders. They have been breed for intelligence, taught to be leaders, told that a soldier never folds before the enemy.

He did not fight when they brought him to this room. He did not fight when they clasped restraints around wrists, ankles, chest, forehead. He did not fight until her power unfurled around him, and she wonders at what wisps of individuality he clings to so desperately.

Tell me, she says, and he gives her his designation, year, unit. She knows these things, is bored by them, and reaches for the subtle shadings, the swirls of colour she sees gliding beneath his thoughts. She pushes and pulls at loose thread after thread of his personality.

In their bright white coats, behind glass, doctors' pens scratch across notepads. Technicians scramble around him, checking heartbeat, respiration, a hundred details that are of no import to her. He doesn't look at any of them. He doesn't look at her. His eyes go unfocused. Maybe he's pretending he isn't here, that none of this is happening. Maybe she will ask him.

They gave her a list of questions, and she asks them, but her own breath catches when she cracks into his mind and he tells them of a mission, and sunshine and wind whipping in his hair. Tell me, tell me, she says, wanting to know, wanting to feel sunshine and wind and--his shoulders are shaking now with more than pain.

Shh, shh, don't fight, she thinks. They just want to map out your mind, dissect your soul, and she wants to dip her fingers into rainbow swirls beneath grey-blue monotony of duty, discipline, mission, Manticore.

It takes months. She does not mind the work. She thinks that he is fascinating, and likes peeling away layer after layer of his mind, of him. She digs in mental fingers and pulls away defences like strips of flesh. She feels him break, sees him break, and he cries then--beautiful, beautiful with red eyes and wet nose, slick lips. She has torn him down to bone and blood, and he is hers now, always.

Tell me, she says. Tell me, tell me everything.

And he does, because she smiles at him, and her desire sings through his head, and he is hers.

She is told what to do with the open wound that she has made of his mind. Fix this, wipe away this memory and that. She makes him not care that he destroyed the woman he loved, makes him forget what it felt like to love. She makes him forget times when he has thought that there must be more, makes sure that all he knows is devotion to his creators. She makes him all shiny and new, picture perfect soldier, and she keeps for herself those little pieces of him that she caught beneath her nails and tore towards herself.

She makes him forget that she took anything at all.


End file.
